


Blow, thou winter wind

by Kibetha



Category: Persona 5
Genre: (kind of), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Captivity, Christmas, Everyday Akechi, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Injuries, Minor Violence, Non-Sexual Bondage, Snow, Technically gen but shipping goggles advised
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:54:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28088841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kibetha/pseuds/Kibetha
Summary: The world faded to nothingness outside the tunnel of light shining ahead of him. No matter how hard he strained his ears, he couldn’t hear a sound. On any other night, Goro might have appreciated feeling like the only human being in the world, alone with nothing but his heartbeat instead of the twisted desires of nine million ignorant monsters. But for once, there was someone he was trying to find.Akechi Goro's Christmas Eve isn't exactly a silent night.
Relationships: Akechi Goro & Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro & Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro & Persona 5 Protagonist, Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 5
Kudos: 56
Collections: 21 plus akeshuake server yuletide 2020 event





	Blow, thou winter wind

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt “Staying Warm” for the 21+ akeshuake server’s Yuletide event. It took a few detours from the prompt along the way...  
> Title is from Shakespeare's _As You Like It:_
> 
> _Blow, blow, thou winter wind.  
>  Thou art not so unkind  
> As man’s ingratitude._
> 
> Slightly inspired by [Pupal](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11676654) by Eyrdamun, one of my favourite P5 fics. Definitely give it a read, it’s way better than anything I could come up with!
> 
> A million thank yous to [Hao](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epinicion) and [Guroboy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/guroakechi) for betaing for me and putting up with 3am brainstorming!

Snow crunched under his feet in time with his steady breathing. Icy air stung his nostrils, puffed in warm gusts from his lips, in, out, again and again. His calves burned, his pulse throbbed, his lungs ached. He was freezing and his body was screaming its protest, but it was white noise to the pulse of cold rage thundering in his ears. He would run for as long as it took until he reached his target.

The frozen forest flew by around him, only the sounds of his own footfalls keeping him company. It wasn’t that late, just after dusk on the chilly evening of Christmas Eve, but the densely packed trees blotted out most of the light from the setting sun. It was strangely peaceful; the world faded to nothingness outside the tunnel of light shining ahead of him, the spotlight of his torch lighting the delicate dance of snowflakes in the night. No matter how hard he strained his ears, he couldn’t hear a sound. On any other night, Goro might have appreciated feeling like the only human being in the world, alone with nothing but his heartbeat instead of the twisted desires of nine million ignorant monsters. But for once, there was someone he was trying to find.

The angle of the torchlight threw the footprints he was following into sharp relief. The imprints were getting deeper as he followed them, with less fresh snow having fallen to blur the crisp lines. He was finally closing in. The footprints were getting closer together too – he wasn’t some kind of expert tracker, but he had enough common sense to be able to work out what that meant. Honestly, he’d thought his prey would have slowed down long before now. Surprising and impressive, as usual. Though he really would have preferred it if his prey could be a _tiny_ bit less stubborn, just this once. At least the little splatters of blood had tapered off a while back. It was harder for him to follow the trail, but there was less likelihood of finding an unconscious body at the other end.

He’d just settled into a rhythm when the trail suddenly took an abrupt turn, disappearing over some icy rocks then ending with a long skid mark down a sharp hill. Goro slowed to a halt to take in the clues, carefully avoiding the ice that his prey had clearly slipped on. A muddy divot lay at the bottom of the hill, the snow blended to slush under the weight of a body. He wondered how long his prey had laid there, stunned, shaking, desperate. Long enough to shock himself out of his panic, perhaps. Long enough to stop and think, rather than fleeing like a rabid animal.

Goro scanned the area with a frown. This part of the forest was more densely covered with tall, broad pine trees, so less snow was able to get through the canopy. It was making it much more difficult to pick up the trail... but no, he could see light brush marks in the snow, like something had been scraped away. His prey was finally making an attempt to hide his tracks. Why the sudden change of tactics? If he had to guess... he’d say he couldn’t run any further. Perhaps an injury from the fall? Goro couldn’t deny a surge of vindictive satisfaction at the thought. If a creature was exhausted, injured, freezing and suddenly realising it couldn’t outrun his pursuer... its last resort would be to _hide._ Smirking like a lion toying with a mouse, he strode on, flashing the torch around for any sign of his wounded prey.

It didn’t take long to spot him. He was doing his best to stay hidden, of course, curled up behind the roots of a large tree, but he wasn’t exactly stealthy in his borrowed red sweater, shoulders heaving, breath making great puffs of white in the cold. He was clutching his arms across his chest, but that didn’t stop him from shivering so hard that Goro could see it clearly in the torchlight.

Their gazes met across the clearing. Wide silver eyes flashed like a steel trap snapping shut. Akira bolted.

He was as quick as ever, but the cold and exhaustion made him unsteady on his feet; Goro caught up and tackled him to the ground in seconds. They tumbled together to the snow, Akira letting out a cry at the sudden impact, but he recovered quickly and twisted like a cat to nail Goro in the face with his elbow. Goro swore viciously, shook off the pain. His vision wavered, but he didn’t hesitate to pull back the hand holding the flashlight and clock the little bastard with the sharp edge. Blood flashed crimson in the gloom. Akira crumpled to the ground, dazed.

Goro spat blood to the side, gasping for air as he recovered from the long chase. He should have known better than to let his guard down, of course. Even in such a state, Akira had zeroed in on the weapon instantly, and the next thing Goro knew, he’d snagged Goro’s sleeve and bashed his wrist hard against the frozen ground. The torch skittered away in the snow, sending their shadows careening around the clearing as they grappled for purchase on each other anew, both of them now blindly throwing blows with the last of their strength.

Stubborn as always, Akira got in several good hits before Goro managed to pin him face-down in the snow, one arm twisted up behind his back, the other trapped under Goro’s knee as he sat heavily on the other boy’s back. “Give it up,” Goro snapped as the body beneath him twisted and writhed like a snake, kicking uselessly at the ground. “You’re not this stupid, Akira.”

“Let me go!!” Akira snarled, wild and savage in a way Goro hadn’t seen for weeks. “Get off me!”

Goro answered by getting a good grip on Akira’s curls to jam his face deeper into the snow, muffling his startled scream. Just in case he hadn’t made his point, he wrenched Akira’s arm higher up his back, stretching the thief’s flexible shoulder to its limit. “Calm the fuck down,” he hissed in his ear, “Unless you want a dislocated shoulder in addition to whatever else you’ve done to yourself.”

This time there was no reply, only violent shivering and the boy’s instinctive attempts to get his face away from the bitter cold. Goro sighed and relented, letting Akira lift his face out of the snow to turn a shaky glare up at him.

He looked... terrible. Honestly, Goro had followed him expecting a chase and a fight, but in the end this was looking more likely to be a rescue mission. One side of his face was covered in dried blood, only emphasising how pale and drained the rest of his skin was. As clearly furious as he was, his eyes were struggling to focus on Goro, lips colourless except for where pink spittle was trickling from the corner of his mouth. He really didn’t need to be half-buried in the snow right now, and yet he showed no signs of surrendering and coming quietly. Fortunately, Goro had expected nothing less.

He reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a small coil of rope, high quality, already soft from wear and use. “S-seriously?” came the disbelieving mutter from beneath him. Akira put up a token struggle as Goro manoeuvred his wrists and bound them with the swiftness of experience, leaving a short length of rope free to use as a leash. He pulled on the rope to test the knot, retrieved the flashlight from in front of Akira’s face, and only then did he let his captive scramble to his feet.

No wonder he was cold. His thin woollen jumper was soaked through, his dark jeans in a similar state. “Honestly, you didn’t even think to bring a coat?” Goro said disdainfully. “Sometimes I wonder what I saw in you.”

“Sh-shut up,” Akira growled.

Goro wasn’t done. “It is minus three degrees out here tonight. You didn’t change your clothes, you didn’t bring supplies, you didn’t even bring a fucking flashlight to see where you were going. What were you _thinking_ , Akira?”

The thief said nothing, only glared mutinously up at him. His teeth chattered treacherously in the silence.

“Tch.” He wanted to say more, to really tear into the little idiot, to make him feel his wrath for making him run around out here in the middle of December, but it would be even more hassle to have to nurse him back to health from hypothermia and frostbite. The rest could wait till they’d got to shelter. “We will speak more back at the cabin,” he said eventually, jerking his head sharply the way they’d come. “Move.”

Akira’s eyes drifted down to the ground, something in his expression shifting. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. His shoulders trembled.

“Akira.”

Akira shook his head, eyes clenched shut.

“That wasn’t a question,” Goro snapped. He grabbed Akira’s sodden shoulder and shoved him hard enough that he lost his balance and ended up on his knees again. “ _Move._ ”

Akira clumsily got back to his feet and shuffled forward through the snow, Goro lighting the way ahead of them as he held the rope taut with his other hand. They began to make their way back through the trees, but their sluggish pace slowed to a crawl when Akira kept stumbling more and more often the further they went. It took a while before Goro realised the reason _why_.

He yanked suddenly on the rope, making Akira jerk backwards so Goro could kick away a cloud of snow from around the other boy’s ankle to take a closer look. Sure enough, he found himself glaring disbelievingly at the soaked slippers on Akira’s feet. He was out in the winter snow in _slippers._ “For fuck’s sake, Akira.”

“I-I’m f-f-fine!” Akira hissed, the words barely even recognisable as he renewed his struggle against his bindings.

Goro didn’t bother replying to that blatant lie. He just rolled his eyes and used Akira’s distraction to throw his captive over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. It was easier than he expected. He felt a pang of guilt at how light the boy was after his five weeks of captivity, most of which he’d spent trussed up like a pig for market. The stupid boy couldn’t seem to figure out that Goro was keeping him locked up for his own _good._ Even now, he was snarling and writhing like some wild frost monster, cursing through his chattering teeth, and all Goro wanted to do was to stop the moron freezing to death.

He jostled him hard, and the air _whumphed_ audibly out of Akira’s lungs as Goro’s shoulder drove into his diaphragm. “Stop wasting your energy. I didn’t spend all this time trying to save your life just for you to throw it away out of spite.”

He started walking and was gratified when his new burden stayed still... or at least as still as he could when he was shaking like a leaf. Goro didn’t know an awful lot about first aid for exposure to the cold – it hadn’t exactly come up whilst studying for his entrance exams – but he was fairly sure that Akira’s wet clothes would just make things worse. He stripped the icy slippers and socks from Akira’s feet and discarded them in the snow, ignoring the muffled protests from behind him. He briefly considered wrapping Akira in his coat, but if he was still shivering that hard, he probably wasn’t lapsing into hypothermia just yet. He could suffer a little. Perhaps it would make him realise how stupid this particular escape attempt had been.

It was a long walk back. Goro had been running for most of the journey there and it had still been a good fifteen minutes. Perhaps the forced proximity would have made it a good time to talk, but Akira was shuddering weakly over his shoulder, and Goro was barely keeping his own breathing steady from the rage still warming his blood. They’d spent five weeks living together, and he still couldn’t believe what a stubborn fool Joker was.

He’d honestly thought they’d come to some kind of arrangement. When Akira first woke up after Goro took him from the interrogation room (and honestly, he still couldn’t believe they’d expected that flimsy plan to work), he’d been quiet, watchful – a feral animal always on guard. He’d also been chained hand and foot to Goro’s bed, with brief breaks only to visit the bathroom (which had turned out to be a mistake when he attempted to ambush his captor with a toilet brush). Other than the toilet brush incident (and that one time Akira had somehow managed to fashion a lockpick out of a soap dispenser), Goro made sure that he was always one step ahead of his rival, and the fuss surrounding the Phantom Thief’s ‘suicide’ slowly died down. As expected, the Phantom Thieves were too shattered by Akira’s ‘death’ to pose any kind of threat, and he hadn’t exactly had much trouble with their pathetic attempts to tail him for information either.

Once it was obvious that Goro was the one who was in control, Akira’s watchfulness gave way to restlessness, which eventually transformed into some kind of desperate curiosity about his captor. With a literal captive audience, Goro was more than happy to spill his guts about the last three years of his shitty life. The catharsis was worth the inevitable frustration when Akira tried to dissuade Goro from reaching the goals he’d thrown away countless lives for, but he’d dealt with more formidable obstacles than a naive teenager’s whining. Even those complaints dried up after Shido finally got what was coming to him.

His miserable excuse for a father fell. Died. Kicked the bucket. Collapsed drooling during his own victory speech. It was the best thing Goro had ever seen, and his only regret was that he had to watch it on a shitty little television in the middle of nowhere rather than being able to laugh in Shido’s face as the black tears oozed from his comically wide eyes. Akira’s silent reproach couldn’t touch him. _Nothing_ could touch him, not anymore. His purpose was fulfilled, and from now on the future was nothing but peace and satisfaction.

Well, if a certain pig-headed Phantom Thief would just lie down and accept defeat already.

The sight of the trees thinning in the torchlight brought Goro back from his thoughts, and he stepped onto the familiar winding pathway that led to their current accommodation. Akira stirred on his shoulder as the dim lights of their cabin came into view; Goro ignored him in favour of glaring at the mess of shattered glass, cracked wood and splattered blood that _had_ been their bedroom window. The cabin windows didn’t even _open_ – Akira must have thrown himself through glass and wood alike. It certainly explained all the blood.

Other than the obvious mess, the little cabin was undisturbed from how he’d left it, a creaky old two-roomed affair that was just a minor step up from a shed. Goro’s slippers still lay on the mat where he’d discarded them, next to Akira’s abandoned boots under the eaves of the small porch. An electric lamp to the left of the front door cast a small puddle of yellow light, just enough to illuminate the cobwebs littering the weathered log cabin walls, but not enough to break the line of the trees twenty feet away. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, there was no way you’d find the place in the vast wilderness of the Hida Mountains.

Luckily for them, the cabin was considerably less rundown than it looked from the outside. Stepping inside was a welcome respite from the frigid air, even after Akira’s thoughtful contribution of a gaping hole in the window. The front door led directly into the main living area, a bright, peaceful space that looked positively domestic with the abandoned cushions and coffee mugs scattered in front of the still-playing television. Goro tramped across the tatami with no consideration for his muddy boots, dragged open the sliding door to the bedroom and unceremoniously dumped his human burden on the farther of the two futons, already rolled out ready for sleep. If it wasn’t for the moaning lump of soggy wool and denim sprawled in front of him, Goro could have been warm, showered and ready for bed by now, perhaps with a nice cup of homemade hot chocolate if he could wrangle Akira into making it for him.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath in through his nose, and breathed out slowly. There was no point in dwelling on the peaceful evening that hadn’t happened. He would play the hand he’d been dealt, as always, and that meant dealing with Akira no matter how difficult he was being. Goro crouched down and untied Akira’s wrists; the other boy winced as his cold, bloodless fingers finally gained freedom of movement.

“Take off those clothes.” The frozen boy’s grey eyes flashed and he opened his mouth to say something snarky, but his teeth were chattering too much. Goro interrupted him before he could form the words. “Yes, Joker, you’re hilarious. Shut up and get changed.”

Once he was sure his orders were being obeyed, Goro crossed the room to the dresser and rummaged through it to find Akira some warm, clean clothes. There weren’t that many options to choose from – they were basically sharing a wardrobe at this point. It sounded a lot more romantic (ha!) than it was – the truth was that he’d simply never intended for the cabin to provide for two teenaged fugitives rather than one. Luckily they were almost the same size, and neither of them was in a position to give a shit about fashion. He pulled out a long-sleeved turtleneck, a hoodie, thick fleecy sweatpants and two pairs of socks and threw them in a pile on the futon. Then he stood guard by the window with his arms crossed, glass crunching under his boots. Normally, he’d think Akira wasn’t stupid enough to try and jump out of a broken window in his underwear, but clearly he had overestimated his intelligence since he’d done almost exactly that less than an hour before.

Once Akira had clumsily struggled into his clothes, Goro jerked his head in the direction of the main room _._ “In there.” The other boy hesitated, clearly wary of the brewing volcano of Goro’s temper, but he eventually complied and shuffled into the other room. Goro grabbed something from the chest of drawers, picked up the duvet from Akira’s futon and followed, shutting the sliding doors behind him. He’d have to do something about the broken window later.

Akira was hovering awkwardly by the centre table with his arms wrapped round himself. His eyes were distant again, slightly out of focus as he shivered. Goro shoved him down by one shoulder to sit on the tatami and wrapped the thick duvet around him, making sure to tuck it tight around his thin shoulders. Then he snapped his fingers in front of Akira’s face and held out his hand. “Arm,” he ordered curtly.

Akira’s eyes widened. “Akechi, you don’t have to...”

“Clearly, I do. Give me your arm.”

There was a long pause where Goro began to wonder if he’d have to brute-force this too, but eventually Akira extended his trembling hand. Goro snapped shut the padded handcuff he’d been holding around Akira’s wrist, then attached the other end to a metal hoop in the floor. He’d screwed the sturdy metal hoop through the tatami and into the floorboards when they arrived and he found Akira was eyeing the door a little too often for his liking. If Akira was stubborn enough, he could probably pull the hoop free, but Goro had kind of had to improvise upon arriving at his safehouse on Election Day with an unexpected captive in tow. Besides, he’d figured – stupidly – that the twenty kilometres of woodland and barren mountainside around them might put Akira off making a break for it, especially once it started snowing. That was half the reason he’d let him out of the handcuffs in the first place.

Now that Akira wasn’t going anywhere, he took the chance to give his captive a quick look-over. He’d really done a number on himself. The colour was starting to come back to his lips and cheeks, but he was still shivering violently and his lungs rasped with every shallow breath. Fresh blood streaked down his face and smudged over the collar of his turtleneck from where he’d obviously reopened a wound while getting dressed. Goro had seen a wealth of other cuts and bruises under his clothes earlier and there were ragged, muddy scrapes across both of his hands as well. Akira was a mess, but perhaps the most concerning thing was how that normally defiant gunmetal gaze was looking alarmingly... empty. Joker’s quiet tenacity was nowhere to be seen.

Well, he could deal with that later, once he was sure the idiot hadn’t given himself frostbite. The cabin was well stocked for a variety of emergencies, considering the reason Goro had acquired it. He’d purchased the safehouse near the beginning of the year when his plans looked to be coming to fruition, bought cheap from a middle-aged woman who was desperately trying to scrounge up enough money to hire a good attorney for her son. The poor man had had a mysterious psychotic episode and attacked his office full of employees in broad daylight, losing everything he’d ever worked for and causing his company no small amount of negative press coverage. (Goro was terribly shocked and sympathetic, of course.) The little retreat the woman sold him was old as the hills but recently renovated – old enough not to be on any recent building permits, but still a nice enough spot to spend his early retirement from being a teenage hitman.

One trip to Mementos later, the last remaining witness to his purchase was drooling in a psych ward and Shido was congratulating him for ‘cleaning up loose ends’, none the wiser to Goro’s new status as the proud owner of a small plot of land in Toyama.

He hadn’t expected to need to play nursemaid for anyone except himself, but it was the work of a few minutes to gather everything he needed to treat his ‘guest’. First and foremost, he grabbed the electric heater from the other room, set it up close to Akira and turned it on. He then boiled the kettle, grabbed the oversized first aid kit from the kitchen cupboard and made a quick tour around the cabin to collect some other essentials, before returning to the living room with his spoils and a brewing pot of green tea. Finally, he turned his attention to the most difficult variable of the equation. Akira hadn’t moved from his sullen huddle on the floor but his shivering was beginning to calm a little, and he accepted the cup of tea Goro handed him without complaint, immediately burying his face in the rising swirls of steam.

“I need to check your feet for frostbite, since you thought _slippers_ were sufficient footwear for the middle of winter,” Goro sighed, sitting down next to his captive.

Akira was never exactly talkative, but somehow Goro could always tell when that silence was meant to sting. The other boy refused to meet his eyes even as he obediently put his feet out for Goro’s inspection. Goro carefully stripped the dry socks from his feet and pointed the beam of the flashlight down at his toes, checking for telltale discolouration. They looked as cold and bloodless as the rest of him, but by some miracle, his long adventure practically barefoot in the snow hadn’t done any permanent damage.

“They’re fine,” he reported. “You have the luck of the devil, as usual. Put your socks back on.”

Akira did as he was told, still silent, letting the jangling of the handcuffs speak for him. Goro sighed loudly, but carried on with his cursory examination of his unwilling patient. The cut at Akira’s hairline didn’t seem to be too bad, just bleeding profusely as head wounds always did. Admittedly, it probably hadn’t been improved by their little scuffle in the snow. He dipped the corner of a towel in the bowl of warm water he’d brought with him and dabbed away the worst of the blood on his face. Only a shower would get the sticky liquid out of his hair, but there was no way he was letting Akira out of the handcuffs tonight. Or _ever._

“Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered coming after you,” he groused, patting harder than necessary at Akira’s pink, oversensitive skin just to see him flinch. “It would save me having to chase you next time if you lost your feet to frostbite.”

Akira’s eyes flashed. “You wouldn’t have to ch-chase me, if you’d just – ”

“Yes, yes, we went through all this five weeks ago. It was tedious then – it’s irritating now.” He glanced sideways at Akira, who was handcuffed to the floor and _still_ trying to escape him, even if it was just by avoiding his gaze. He really had thought they were past this. Akira certainly hadn’t been _happy_ staying here, but Goro thought he’d at least been coming to the realisation that he didn’t have a choice. Now, out of nowhere, he’d apparently leapt out of a window into the elements without planning beyond the next two minutes. It wasn’t just reckless... it was suspiciously out of character.

“Did you really not think past leaving the house?” he probed, keeping his voice casual. “I’ve told you multiple times how far from civilisation we are. All that was waiting for you out there was a slow and miserable death.”

“So not much different than in here, huh?”

Goro blinked. He almost couldn’t believe those words had come from the mouth of his cocky, determined, unflinchingly optimistic rival. Akira clearly realised the same thing; the bitter snarl on his face quickly smoothed back into an enviable poker face. But it was much too late to hide from him.

What had brought all of this on? Had this been Akira’s last-ditch attempt at escape before finally giving in to the inevitable? Desperate men could do stupid things. But no... even then, it was too sudden; something must have provoked it. Just a few hours before, they’d been making dinner together, Akira dramatically bemoaning the paltry choice of ingredients in the cupboards even as Goro watched the sparkle return to his eyes at the simple pleasure of being allowed in the kitchen again. It was hard to believe he was even dealing with the same person.

He hadn’t had time to investigate his surroundings in the wake of Akira’s escape before throwing himself out the door after him, but perhaps there was some clue nearby. Had there been some outside influence – had Akira received a message or some new information from somewhere? Perhaps this hopeless escape attempt wasn’t as hopeless as it first seemed.

He looked around the small room. He wasn’t a detective anymore (as if he ever really had been) but he could still use what he’d learnt on the job. Nothing seemed obviously out of place at first glance: the book Akira had been reading was still open on the table, his half-drunk mug of cold coffee next to it. The television was on and had been the whole time, cheerful white noise beneath the tension of their confrontation. Perhaps Akira had seen something on the news? It probably wasn’t beyond Sakura’s abilities to hijack national television either, come to think of it. But all that was playing now was a Featherman Christmas special, one of the newer ones with a big budget and not as much soul. He’d watched the movie a dozen times before as a child, stuck in front of a TV in more loveless homes than he could count. It wasn’t bad, if a little on the corny side, but it wasn’t likely to have deluded Akira into believing he had superpowers in the real world. Perhaps there had been something on before this started? He wasn’t one hundred percent certain, but he thought the movie was only about halfway through.

That line of thought tailed off as soon as he looked over at Akira. The other boy had followed his gaze to look at the television, and the ice in his eyes had cracked slightly. Even now, Joker’s poker face never let Goro see much deeper than the trickster intended, but he thought he detected... regret? Resentment?

Goro didn’t get it. The movie certainly wasn’t that bad. He sighed yet again and eventually conceded; he had all the power here, so perhaps he could give a little to get an answer. It was something he never would have done for his rival a few months back, but something about having had said rival bound, chained and at his mercy for weeks had kind of shifted the balance of power. Besides, Akira always responded best to sympathy and guilt, in Goro’s experience.

“Will you tell me what’s wrong?” he asked softly.

There was a long silence filled only by the faint noises coming from the TV. Feather Hawk was making some heroic speech to rouse the young team’s fighting spirit, full of Sentai buzzwords like ‘justice’ and ‘belief’ and ‘friends’. It was just the kind of shitty monologue he’d always admired Akira for avoiding, unlike the rest of his herd of naive sycophants. It was ironic that he now found himself wishing Akira was the type to spew out his every last sentiment.

Just when Goro had given up waiting, Akira finally muttered a reluctant answer. “I told Futaba we’d watch this together. She used to watch it every Christmas as a child.” Akira paused, then added pointedly, “With her mom.”

Goro rolled his eyes. Well _that_ was unnecessary. “Oh, you mean the one I killed?” he asked dryly. “Thank you so much for reminding me, Kurusu – I had forgotten all about it.”

That familiar silver glare cut sideways. “Bastard.”

Five weeks of arguing over the same old shit had rather stripped the drama out of the topic of Goro’s murderous past. Akira was really scraping the bottom of the barrel if he was trying to throw him off with that one. “So what, you thought you’d run all the way to Tokyo in time for Christmas?” Goro continued incredulously. “You’re a sentimental idiot, but you’re not _that_ stupid.”

“I... didn’t think I was going to get anywhere. Not really. I just...” Akira trailed off, the fire in his eyes fading away again as his gaze flicked back to the TV screen. He bit his lip, swallowed, words turning behind his eyes that Goro couldn’t see. But Goro could be patient when needed. He waited for Akira to sort through his thoughts, silent and watchful as the crow he’d named himself for.

On the screen, the Feathermen were still shouting affirmational bullshit at each other. Feather Ostrich yelled something loud and stupid about teamwork beating raw power, Feather Toucan giggled sickeningly about having all she needed with her friends by her side. _“As long as you believe in your friends,”_ Feather Dooka intoned with all the sincerity a washed-up actor could muster from behind a plastic mask, _“Your friends will believe in you. That’s all the power we need!”_

There was a thud on the table beside him. Akira had slammed his mug down on the surface, his fingers clenched around the handle hard enough to reopen the scrapes on his palms. Goro eyed him warily, muscles tensing as he prepared to wrestle Akira back into compliance again. But his grey eyes were fixed on the screen, glaring at the Feathermen as if their words of camaraderie had personally offended him.

“I shouldn’t be here, Akechi,” Akira whispered.

Goro settled back on his hands, studying his rival as if the answers to the challenges he presented could be read on his skin. The picture was coming together and it was a lot less interesting than he’d initially suspected. No elaborate message from Oracle on national television, no sudden genius escape plan, just... a boy driven to desperation by homesickness. And yet it was the first time in five weeks that he’d seen Akira break like this. He’d seen him silently plotting, recklessly attacking, earnestly negotiating... but never once had he seen his eyes turn glassy and hopeless like this. It made something uncomfortably close to guilt rise in his throat.

He swallowed it down, choosing the familiar heat of anger instead. “If you’ll recall,” he said pleasantly with his best ‘I’m trying not to throttle you’ smile, “your only alternative to being here was being dead.”

“You could have let me go.”

He sighed heavily. “No, I could not. How many times must we go over this, Akira?”

The death of the teenaged leader of the Phantom Thieves had been almost as widely publicised as Shido’s. If the boy who had been one of Akechi’s most high-profile assassination targets suddenly showed up _not dead_ , that was going to be a red flag that Shido’s people would be able to see from space. With Goro in hiding, Akira would be their next closest lead, and the younger boy simply didn’t understand how far these people would go to put down a dog that had bitten the hand that feeds it. The idea that Akira could simply waltz back into his peaceful existence as a social butterfly flitting around half of Tokyo was ludicrous, no matter how many times he proposed it. As far as Goro was concerned, he was saving the idiot from his own naivety, and all he ever got for it was bitching and whining.

“While you are here, you are _alive,_ ” he said aloud, the ice in his voice rivalling the snow outside. “I have kept you that way against all your best efforts, at great risk to both myself and my objectives, and you’re trying to get yourself killed again because of a Featherman movie!”

“Because it’s _Christmas!_ ”

The dull _plop_ of blood hitting wood shouldn’t have been nearly so loud, but it rang in the silence following Akira’s outburst. Goro looked down at the same time Akira did, to find Akira’s hand wrapped pale and shaking around the handle of his mug as crimson trickled down the clean white ceramic. Both boys stared at the fresh blood like starving sharks. Goro had almost forgotten that he still hadn’t treated Akira’s wounds.

He carefully detached Akira’s hand from the mug, reaching out with the towel in his other hand to mop at the dribble of blood sliding down the boy’s wrist. “Kurusu,” he said with measured calm, “I know this may come as a shock to you, but your friends do not require your guidance to successfully make it to December 25th without spontaneously combusting.”

Akira snatched his hand back with a snarl. “I know! Damn it, Akechi, I know that. I just...!”

Goro stayed very still, frozen with the bloody towel still held out in front of him. He felt like he was trying to calm a wild animal, a feeling he hadn’t had since his last interaction with Shido. Akira’s eyes had gone distant again, but Goro was beginning to understand what was needed from him here. Akira may be bleeding on the surface, but something more important was breaking underneath, and it got closer to healing with every reluctant word Goro was dragging out of him. It wasn’t something Goro was used to, and he got the feeling it wasn’t something Akira had experienced often either. But there was something thrilling in watching Joker unravel and knowing he was the only person there to gather the threads.

He stilled, and he waited.

“I was in Shibuya with Morgana, a few days before...” Akira murmured, his gaze fixed on his bloody hand in his lap. “We were... shopping. To take our minds off things. I ended up in the bargain store on Central Street. The one that always has weird seasonal stuff.” His lips quirked up fractionally at the corners. “Mona likes it because he says it’s like a maze.”

“I know it,” Goro said quietly when the silence stretched too long.

“They had tiny light-up Christmas trees, even in November. It was stupid, but I still bought one. Because...” He trailed off, but Goro could fill in the blanks. _Because it was a physical promise to himself that he would still be around at Christmas._ “And then... I got some tinsel for the little tree. And then I bought a stupid reindeer hat online because I thought it’d make Futaba laugh. I was thinking we could put up some shitty little toys I won in the arcade as decorations, maybe some fairy lights or something if Sojiro let me. And I got presents for everyone early, just in case I didn’t... in case...” His eyes slid out of focus for a long moment, before he shuddered and shook his head sharply in a motion Goro was beginning to recognise whenever Akira lost his way back from memories of his time in police custody. The guilt rose in his chest again like acid.

Of _course_ Akira had been worrying about something as banal as Christmas gifts for his teammates, even as they planned for his murder. No doubt Sojiro had found them later among the organised chaos of the attic that Akira had somehow turned into a home, probably labelled neatly and left somewhere easy to find. He imagined the Phantom Thieves gathering, weeping together, passing out their meticulously chosen and wrapped presents and reading into every tiny nuance of their ‘dead’ friend’s regard for them. Perhaps it said something about Goro that all the emotion he could muster for the grieving Thieves was contempt. If they cared for their leader anywhere near as much as he loved them, they wouldn’t have thrown him to a wolf like Goro.

Akira’s eyes were shut, his shoulders shaking once more. Wherever he was in his head, it wasn’t there in the cabin with Goro anymore. “I... I’d just found it, I’d just found all of them, and now I...” He shook his head weakly, his deep voice breaking like the teenager everyone so often forgot he was. “I just want to go home.”

It was only when a drip of clear liquid fell onto the bundled duvet over Akira’s knees that Goro realised Akira was crying. He didn’t make a sound, his breathing didn’t hitch, and his face stayed smooth and even. How typical, that this was yet another thing Kurusu Akira did with quiet grace. Goro had spent years of his childhood trying to learn how to cry quietly and never quite got the hang of it. He realised, suddenly, that perhaps Akira had too.

Goro watched in something close to awe as yet another of his rival’s myriad of masks fell away to reveal a lonely, unwanted child just like him. He’d always assumed Akira’s home life had been some perfect suburban dreamscape. After all, the boy had two parents in respectable careers, perfect grades in all his classes and a nice house in a picturesque little community. He was always so disgustingly full of hope and optimism, even when faced with the metaphysical proof of humanity’s twisted heart. Of course Goro had assumed that someone so perfect and well-adjusted had been given the childhood he’d only dreamed of... but now he realised he’d never actually bothered to ask. And why the hell hadn’t he? Akira was his rival, his antithesis, the other half of his coin. Of course he must have gone through life alone without anyone in his corner – how else could someone as strong as Joker have clawed his way through everything the Metaverse threw at him with nothing but indomitable willpower and the steel of his glare?

And now Akira had finally found people who gave a shit about him, and Goro had taken him away from them. How typical of a cursed child to steal happiness even when he was trying to do something good. Goro couldn’t really hold tonight’s events against him anymore. After all, what desperate lengths would Goro have gone to if he found someone who loved and understood him after all this time?

Well... he didn’t really need to wonder; the answer was sniffling into his duvet right in front of him, alive and (mostly) well despite all of Shido’s plans.

Akira didn’t look up as Goro dropped the bloody towel back in the bowl of water and shuffled closer on his knees, reaching out to tuck the duvet more securely around his trembling rival. Akira kept his eyes clenched shut until the solid weight of Goro’s arms wrapped around his shoulders. He got a brief glimpse of the expression of utter shock on Akira’s face before pulling him firmly against his chest.

Akira’s ragged breathing hitched against Goro’s neck. “Akechi...?”

“Shut up, Joker.”

They sat quietly in the tense silence, the television chattering on in the background like the soundtrack to their bizarre farce of friendship. Akira was stiff, barely breathing, and the wrist restrained in the handcuff dangled awkwardly to one side. He’d stopped crying, but that seemed to be more from shock than anything else. Goro gritted his teeth against the surge of mortification rising in his ribcage. What the hell had he been thinking? He was Akira’s _kidnapper_ , his near-murderer, and it wasn’t like someone as emotionally stunted as him had any idea how to offer comfort in the first place. This had been a mistake, a ridiculous decision made in the heat of the moment, just like _all_ his decisions around Akira. Perhaps he could play it off as trying to warm up his captive to stave off hypothermia, or perhaps he should turn this on Akira, make him feel small for needing comfort so he didn’t notice how much of a _fuck-up_ Goro was, or maybe he could –

He was so lost in his racing thoughts that he almost didn’t notice the infinitesimal softening of Akira’s shoulders as he slumped against Goro’s chest. A breath shuddered out of the thief and suddenly he was shaking in his embrace, body wracked with silent sobs. Joker fell apart, and out of all the many people who cared about him, it was Akechi Goro who got to catch the pieces.

Goro stroked Akira’s back lightly through the duvet, feeling a sort of stunned numbness creeping over him. Just a month ago, he’d stared down the barrel of a gun at this boy, fully intending to erase his small but special life from the world. And now he could feel Akira’s breath hot against his throat, tickling lightly against his pulse, an unpleasantly humid reminder that Akira was only alive because of him. The irony was almost too much to bear.

The television flickered in rapid pulses of bright light, and Goro found his eyes tiredly tracking the mindless action. Bodies flew around the screen, ridiculous battle cries were cried, and there were a truly obscene number of explosions. Someone in spandex yelled something about ‘eradicating the arthropodous menace threatening our justice’. The disconnect between himself, the situation and the familiar body in his arms widened beneath him like the mouth of a yawning chasm. Goro suddenly felt exhausted.

“I’m sorry.” The words were out before he realised they’d come from his own lips. The hoarse breaths against his neck stopped abruptly. Of course, the idea of Akechi Goro apologising was probably stranger than the fiction on the screen; no doubt Akira was wondering if his injuries were making him hallucinate. Goro swallowed bitterly. “I don’t regret my choices, and I don’t regret keeping us both safe, but...”

_I regret that you were roped into my mess. I regret that I took everything from you, just as he took it all from me. I regret that, in the end, it’s me who has broken you after everything you survived. Most of all, I regret that I don’t regret a thing, because you’re here with me._

“Merry Christmas, Akira,” Goro said eventually. “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry you have to spend it with someone like me.”

Akira didn’t reply, but he didn’t pull away either. Goro glanced down and found hazy grey eyes not looking at him at all, reflecting the bright colours of the movie as he stared blankly at the small screen. Well, he could work with that. He wasn’t Sakura, and this wasn’t Leblanc, and the only colourful decorations in the cabin were the ruby splatters of Akira’s own blood, but at least they could watch the film. There were still wounds to tend, glass to sweep, a great big hole in the side of the property... but for now, he could let Akira have this one thing.

In a draughty cabin in the mountains, miles away from the heart of Tokyo, two boys sat and watched a Christmas movie. Their pale faces were lit intermittently by the flickering screen, highlighting the matching bruises on their faces as they sat silently shoulder to shoulder, neither wanting to break the uneasy truce between them. On the dusty little television screen, evil was vanquished, the world was saved and friendship overcame all adversity.

**Author's Note:**

> Yaldy waiting in the Depths of Mementos: "......"
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!


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